Right, here we go. First, I'd like to thank you all for the reviews (now over 30, yay!) and the really intellegent and incisive comments your adding.

Secondly, I want to put a warning on this. This is a quite brutal chapter, I haven't spared the detail really and as its set on Flanders Fields you can guess the sort of thing it includes. I'm sure you know what to expect from me in terms of angst as well....


On Flanders fields the poppies grow, between the crosses row on row. The Poppies had always amazed Peter, even more so than the relentless inhuman slaughter going on around him. No matter how beaten and sodden the earth became they were always there, bright red heads standing out against the brown reality around them.

He looked through the periscope once more and watched as one slowly opened before him, flowering between the crock of a dead soldiers twisted shoulder. He wondered who the man was, for a moment; one of ours or one of theirs? It didn't matter really, nor would anyone ever be able to tell. The man's uniform had been blasted away by the explosion that had killed him and he lay bareheaded beneath the turquoise sky.

Back home there would be strawberries and cream he supposed. Fresher's would be strolling round the quads of Oxford in there boaters while he could envisage his mother and Wendy taking a walk round Hyde Park, basking in the glorious sunshine that beat down upon freshly mown grass. Here it just shined on blasted devastation, the corpses of ten thousand men trapped in a thirty meter gap.

He had once thought was glorious, he remembered his battles with Hook and the colour that had accompanied them. Here even the blood was dark and dank, a nasty red colour that quickly mixed with the mud rather than the scarlet of those old days. He looked out again, back towards the enemy line just metres away, separated by barbed wire and bad blood. And the poppies of course, hundreds of them spouting across the battlefield, a vague mockery of the old ways of doing things.

He heard a shout and commotion behind him, and looked as his men began to cluster towards the back trenches. Letters. Every Wednesday the postman would emerge from the back trenches to his unit and would immediately be crowded by the men desperate to hear from home. They would disappear off then, back to bunks and cubby houses to read and sob over the news from home; the marriage of a sister that they would witness or a girlfriend finally running out of patience and breaking off their relationship.

Peter rarely got letters. Who would send them? His mother wrote monthly and letters from his father where even rarer. Wendy meanwhile was a marked woman, a suffragette and known radical, her letters never got through the censor without behind reduced to shreds. He didn't have a girl back home to write to him, while his friends where either dead or serving in the same apart of the line. So Peter didn't rush to the postman but instead moved back to his room, a small bunk in a corrugated cave etched from the mud of field.

He shared with the other officers in the company, currently two lieutenants and a terminally foolish ensign who was currently being shipped back to blighty after having got in the way of a buzz bomb. He lay back on his bed and thought.

He thought about Neverland. He rarely thought about it nowadays, so detached he'd become from the gloriousness of the island but now he turned his thought back towards the place and wondered just what was going on there. Was it all still there, he wondered, or had the new Pan reshaped the five-pointed isle to something more of his liking? He could never remember all of his time there, just the last few days and the shocking pain as Hook killed him. He would never forget that; never forgot what it felt like to die.

There was a knock on the iron door of the bunker, "Enter," Peter barked, sitting a little straighter in the bunk. It was the postman, who reached deep into his kaki bag and withdrew a beautifully white letter. It seemed to light up the room with its cleanliness and emit a soft glow in the darkness.

"Captain Peter Darling?" the postman asked,

"Yes?" Peter responded, stepping up and reaching out towards the letter the postman pulled it back.

"May I see some ID, sir?" Peter reached into his pocket a pulled out his brown service ID, complete with a small photograph on it. The postman studied it and then handed over the letter. "Good day to you, sir," and left.

Peter retreated to his bed and ran his hands over the letter. He marvelled at its cleanliness and purity, watching as his hands left damp brown marks on the perfect surface. Nothing was ever clean here. He watched as little golden flakes dripped from the letter as they were disturbed by hands, he licked his fingers. Fairy dust.

He opened the letter hesitantly, not noticing that he was now floating a good foot off the bed. The magic was returning to him again, and he opened it up with anticipation. Inside the letter glowed with Wendy's beautifully manicured handwriting;

Dear darling Peter,

I am sorry I havn't written for so long, but I have been busy. Besides I doubt the (a dark segment here where the censor had removed Wendy's writing). Things are good back home in ------- and we are all well. Mother and father are doing well, as is Nana, though she is getting a little old now.

I had a message from John Pan the other day. He needs your help with a little issue back at his home. Apparently there are just too many children for him to take care of, and dear Michael has been unable to help, nor have I. He wondered if you had any advice on the matter, or if anything similar had happened in your time there. Please reply quickly as he is getting quite distressed.

Love,

Wendy.

Peter sat back and thought about Neverland once more. It was true that Pan did have other duties, occasionally time consuming but essentially easy. One was to guide the angels to the edge of the universe and comfort them on their way. It could be harrowing on occasion, he remembered once when an angel had cried for his mother the whole way there, but they were generally plaint and easy to guide.

He never knew what happened to them after that, he had never even wondered just who the angels where, though he could now guess. It had always just been a duty that interrupted the fun for moment, but only for a moment. Could there ever be that many to stop a Pan from enjoying himself?

It was, he supposed possible, especially with this dratted war adding thousands of new angels every day. But the angels where children weren't they? They always had been when he was Pan, children who had been expelled from the world too soon and who needed leading away. If they weren't led away then they would just stay around the material world; ghouls and ghosts.

Just what happened to the adult angels?

This was, Peter grasped the key question. At what age did one become an adult, at what age could one guide himself? He didn't know the answer, nor did he know quite where Pan lead the angels that did come to him. Wendy's deliberately obtuse language hadn't helped him understand the problem; just how many angels was John Pan dealing with? There were just too many questions.

Peter had never really thought about death. It was not in his nature to be troubled about such things and he had always had the assurance that death was just another adventure. Now he felt a shiver run down his spine on considering such questions, a feeling he had never felt before.

Panic enveloped him, choking him like a mask. If Neverland was in trouble then where else could fall? He had always felt that it was eternal and detached from the real world, somewhere he could let his mind escape too, away from the troubles of the world. Had this war, this final disgraceful war, managed to corrupt that as well?

He controlled himself and tried to plan. This wasn't how an officer behaved; he reminded himself let alone a fellow of Balliol College and an Etonian. He had to head home, he had to meet John and solve this problem before it got out of hand. The consequences, he knew, of failing to act would be terrible. Neverland would die, finally the light of imagination would go out, choked by the mechanical slaughter.

It is possible that Peter would have managed to get home and save Neverland, had it not been for the buzz bomb that landed in his trench at that very moment. It had been fired minutes earlier, from a 210mm Howitzer on the German side of the line, just one of hundreds of missiles fired that day.

It smashed into the corrugated iron door of Peter bunker, sending its explosion rippling down the trenches to either side and creating a hundred flying iron fragments into the bunker itself; leaving only angels in its wake. Captain Peter Darling, BA (ox) was dead, his corpse barely recognisable when hauled from the wreckage, shredded as it was by thousands of metal bullets. Just one of thousands of casualties to fall on another bloody day.

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.


I like the emotional sledgehammer, don't I. Possibly this chapter is overwritten but I wanted to emphasise the tragedy of the second world war. Plus I seem to have an obsession with killing Peter as well. I don't think the chapter was deserving of an M but tell em what you think. Don't dispair though (as if you would) its unlikly tha I'll be able to keep him dead. TBH I didn't even intend to kill him at all, I was thinking of all sorts of ways to get him out of the situation (just flying off for example,) but the keyboard led me towards his death and nothing else I tried I seemed to work.

Please review and tell me what you think,

BrooklynRed x